Lightroom is the last holdout in apps that I can't yet replace with a linux equivalent, That being said, it's not the photo editing aspect I'm looking to replace, as there are lots of tools out there for that. What I'm having trouble replacing is the photo organisation aspect, and more specifically, something that supports/imports Lightroom hierarchal keywords. I've got nearly 20,000 keyworded photos collected over decades, and at the moment, I'm largely chained to Lightroom to keep them organised.

In terms of hardware, what are some good cost effective resources and what what things might I want to consider differently than what I am used to in both the Mac and Windows worlds? I need smart home management, a plex hub, and photo editing, as well as the usual other stuff.

EDIT: I use Capture One for photo organizing and editing. I have old computers I can repurpose for this endeavor, but they are pretty old. My main thought for this post was looking into what kind of hardware I could consider for building a new Linux system from scratch. I am very much am inclined to switch to Home Assistant,because Siri is dumb as a bag of rocks, and AppleHome does not have the features I want and is extremely buggy. Everything I have currently is in the Apple ecosystem, and my daily driver is an M2 Mac Mini. I am not inclined to put Linux on the Mac Mini at this stage. I use the complete Proton suite for all that stuff. Thanks!

I actively maintain a website with SSH (git clone) does desktops environments like vanillaOS and silverblue allow this?

I switched to Linux a few years ago and I remember how scary it was. No one in my surroundings used Linux back then, therefore I was on my own. I had lots of questions and had to use try and error, more error in the beginning I have to say.

Let's help new comers to the world of Linux to have an easy start, to then dive into the wonderful rabbit hole that FOSS is.